


Shield of the Ages

by JaneTurenne



Category: Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: I mean something a little more literal than usual in this case, Other, When I say 'Narvin/Gallifrey', anthropomorphized planet fic was always going to happen here sometime who are we even kidding, look I never claimed to be sane okay, or a LOT more literal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 09:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12055932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTurenne/pseuds/JaneTurenne
Summary: In the last desperate days of the Time War, one of Rassilon’s plans produces unexpected consequences, and a very tired Time Lord learns the shape of what his life has been.





	Shield of the Ages

Of things that have happened this week in the Time War, Gallifrey assuming humanoid form isn't even the strangest Narvin can think of off the top of his head.

There were moments of Romana's Presidency--of _both_ of her Presidencies--when Narvin was convinced she was mad (and generally made a point of telling her so). But now that Rassilon sits in her chair, Narvin understands what it means to serve under a President who is well and truly out of his mind. And it's _terrifying_ , in a way that following Romana never was.

He has learned to keep silent, to run his Agency quietly, to save those he can from the worst of Rassilon's tyrannies and stay out of sight the rest of the time. There's nothing more he can do. What power he has, he can use to help his planet and its people, and throwing that away in useless displays of defiance would be the kind of waste that no one can afford in the middle of this endless War. He refrains from spying on his new President, because the kind of schemes that the Founder dreams are none of Narvin's business. He doesn't say a word about the Never-Wases, or the Cruciform scheme, or the genetic aberrations, or the alliance with the Angels, or the attempt to cage the Eternals, or the sacrifice of the Nightmare Child. Narvin can't stop any of those plots, insane though he knows they are, and it would be folly to stand in their way.

He doesn't know about the Gallifrey plan, then, not until it has already come to pass. He has no idea why the guards arrive at his door, summoning him into the presence of the living godking. If he had anyone to pray to, Narvin supposes that's what he'd be doing now. If he had anyone left to say goodbye to, he'd be doing that instead. As it is, he stands quietly from his desk and follows the Chancellery Guardsmen sent to collect him without hesitation. If he is going to his death, he won't be leaving anything behind.

Rassilon does not possess an office, as his predecessor did, not anymore. His usual haunt cannot be called anything but a throne room. He is seated when Narvin enters, and does not trouble himself to stand. Narvin bows.

"My Lord President. How may I be of service?"

Rassilon eyes Narvin up and down. They've met before, several times, but there is little recognition in the President's eyes. If anything, his expression is a mixture of disbelief and scorn. Rassilon turns away from Narvin, towards a dark corner of the room.

"Truly?" Rassilon asks. " _Him_?"

Narvin has no idea how to answer, nor what the question even means. Before he can try, however, a female voice speaks from behind Rassilon's throne.

"Yes," she says. "If you would see your petty plan brought to pass, it must be him, and no other."

Narvin's jaw threatens to drop even before she steps into view. Her voice is like water over smooth stones, like the wind in the caden trees. The blur of motion that slides through the shadows is graceful as a song. And then she's standing before him, and her eyes are twin suns, her hair every orange of a sunset, clothed in thousand rippling tiers of bloodred silk that seem to move of their own accord. She walks as though the world is shaping itself in her image, and suddenly she's very close, and he realizes he has dropped to his knees, staring upwards in abject awe.

" _My Lady_ ," Narvin whispers.

She looks down at him for a moment, smiling with her blinding eyes and the very corners of her perfect mouth. "There," she says, her gaze on Narvin. "You see?" She turns back to the throne, and when her eyes leave his a jolt passes through him, as his body remembers to breathe again. "Surely the proud Rassilon knows something of the thrill of worship."

Rassilon surveys Narvin coldly. "A cowering insect," he sneers. "Unworthy even to look on you."

"As are you," she answers, with the efficient, clean cruelty of a razor-sharp blade. "But of the two of you, only he has the wisdom to know his place."

"Enough," snaps Rassilon, standing. "I summoned you for a purpose, _My Lady_. It was _my_ power that brought you here. You shall obey _my_ will."

"Oh, yes, you had cleverness enough to force my soul into this feeble shell, that I do not deny. But that is your only power. I am older and stronger and _more_ than your little mind can possibly imagine. If you should lay so much as a finger upon me, I can and shall destroy myself and you and all yours with me. Do not think to threaten me, _My Lord_."

"Do you think I can't tell a bluff?"

"I think you cannot hear the truth when it is spoken plainly to your face," she says. "As it happens, I do wish to help my Time Lords even more than you do--and they are _my_ Time Lords, not yours. You dangled wires from machines and turned dials and ran currents and proclaimed yourself the father of a new race, while I for all of time have nurtured them, raised them and loved them and cradled them close. You have proved a degenerate parent to the Time Lords, as I have not. And now you think to sire a new breed, more children for you to neglect and abuse?" She laughs, clear and bitter. "I shall use this form to the purpose for which you shaped it. I shall be a mother once more, give my Time Lords a sister to fight this War by their side. They are the Sword of the Ages, and they shall have their Shield, new and strong and shining, their mother protecting them as ever in this. But _you_ shall be no part in it, Rassilon. If I must trust any man to father my dearest daughter, it shall be one who has proven himself as a protector of my other children, who has given his life and hearts and honor to serve both my Time Lords and me." 

"My Lady," Narvin hears himself say, though he isn't sure how he dares, "I do not know how you came to take this shape, and I do not understand what you have been saying. But if he seeks to harm you..."

"You will do as you are told by your betters, Coordinator," snaps Rassilon.

"...If he seeks to harm you," Narvin repeats, and pulls out his staser, and points it at Rassilon's head, "I will do what little I can to protect you. He would not stay dead for long, but if my death could buy you time..."

She lays her hand on his cheek. Her touch is fire and ice and the end of all things. He feels as though he's died. He feels more alive than he has ever been. "My brave little man," she says. In his peripheral vision, Rassilon is moving, but by then she has pulled the staser from Narvin's hand and re-trained it on the President. Her arm is steady, her aim true, although she hasn't looked away from Narvin. "I would not ask you to give your life for so little."

"But my Lady..."

She covers his mouth with three graceful fingers. "I know," she says. "I see what has been taken from you, all that you have lost. I hear the song of your sorrow. I know that you live now only to fight for me, and know too how gladly you would lay down that burden. And so you shall, my most loyal. You have earned your rest. But you must do me one last service." She takes her hand away, and smiles the sweetest smile he has ever seen. "You are so small to me, all of you, so brief. Even he," she looks for a fraction of a second to Rassilon, "is but a moment in time. To grow attached to any one of you, or to your species itself, is only to condemn myself to the pain of such swift loss. Before you go, I would have you give me something to remember you by--you, and all my Time Lords. Will you give me this balm for my suffering, Narvinektrolonem of the CIA?"

"I will do anything you ask," he whispers, "my Lady."

"There, you see?" she says, turning back to Rassilon. " _You_ have never said my name like _that_."

Rassilon waves a hand in obvious concession. It may have something to do with the staser still trained unerringly at his head. "So be it," he says, his mouth pinching sourly. "It is no matter to me how you fulfill my intention, only that it is done. Take him away and do with him as you will." Rassilon looks at Narvin with an expression of such pungent disdain as even his Lady President never achieved. "And kill him when you're finished with him, or I’ll send someone else to take care of him who won’t feel as _tenderly_ towards him as you seem to. I don’t want him spreading stories."

"I will give him his death,” she says, calmly, “but only for his own sake.”

She takes Narvin by the hand, and leads him from the throne room. He thinks Rassilon calls back something, but he cannot hear it. He hears nothing but the way her robes rustle, a thousand tiny fires as Gallifrey burns, and watches her feet, the beautiful rich bronze-brown skin of her bare toes and ankles as they appear and vanish from beneath her hem with each step. He does not know where she is taking him, but he follows, would follow if his hearts stopped, will follow her until his bones wear to nubs and dissolve to become part of her.

There is a room, and she leads him to it. He notices nothing about it, except that it has a door, which closes. She takes his face in her hands and kisses his mouth, and he _opens_ to her--not his lips only, he wishes, but his skin, and his ribs, and his muscles. The Vampires are his people’s ancient enemy, her enemy, but he wishes she would take his blood, if that would not be sacrilegious.

Gallifrey laughs against his mouth. “So eager,” she murmurs. “So _giving_.” She traces her fingers over his temple. “So little left to give,” she says, but it is kind, not cruel. “She wore my face in your dreams--I saw them. My jewel-bright, reckless, coruscating girl, the one who took all the rest of yourself, at your urging.”

Neither of them need name their dead to know which Time Lady she means. “Yes,” says Narvin, hollow yet yearning, unabsolved.

“And my adopted daughter!” She _laughs_ , clapping her hands, and it swells symphonies in his chest. “Dear jealous boy, did you think I would forget you, to share my love with her, too? How _alive_ she was, how she fed me! What a hundred more just like her might have done!”

Stricken, he thinks how he fought, long ago, against opening Gallifrey’s borders. She soothes him with a smile and a kiss to the corner of his mouth, and the touch of her hands as she cradles his face is deeper than skin, sinking through him. “You are the last,” she whispers to him, meaning so _much_ , and only as she kisses one away does he feel his tears.

“Yes,” he says again, letting her ease his eyelids down with a gracefully delicate palm. “ _Please_ , my Lady, I am so _tired_.”

“I know,” she soothes, and, gently though an order, “Shhh.”

Now his eyelids are shuttered, he feels the other hands he has not seen; she is everywhere, all around him, and however she was forced into this shape, she need not reconcile herself to it. She removes his clothing as subtly, as gently as gravity tugging, unseen but inexorable, and he is too empty of anything to feel shame. He is only _here_ , devoid of past or future. He has, long ago, given her his years.

“Look at me, Narvinektrolonem,” she says, in the air around his ear and into his head.

He looks, and she is, and is not, standing naked before him. The body she does not have intertwines his, and they are, and are not, lying on sheets of flutterwing silk, are and are not in the red grass hidden from the sky, his back is and is not wet-cold with the snow of her mountaintops and they are falling through the air and drowning in the sea. She is touching him, everywhere, as she always has been. He dares to touch her skin, where her hips would be if she had them, her own hands and unbody urging him on.

 _Say my name, Narvin_ , say words that are everywhere.

“My Lady,” he says, not daring the greater truth even in the bliss of his unmaking.

 _Not that one_ , she says, and she is everywhere.

“Romana,” he breathes, because to him, it is true. She rewards that name with a kiss to his mouth--as much as he has a mouth, or she does--but she has not done demanding, any more than his Lady President ever did.

 _The true one, my love,_ she whispers with no speech.

He draws his last breath, and opens his eyes. The seven systems glow and pulsate where her eyes will never be.

“ _Gallifrey_ ,” says Narvin.

*

The Doctor tells many lies in the after-years, of his planet and about its fall. He has seen the shape of the scar on the universe, the wound to everything that is. He has seen its protector.

She does not have a shape, this being. She does not have a name. She is golden and red, sun and blood of the multiverse, and she flows like a mist on the sea. She touches the Doctor’s cold hand when he reaches, from the painfully pedestrian front stoop of a police-box through the knife-cold empty space between the stars. 

She whispers in his ear and calls him _Brother_. She breathes against his lips and tells him _Run_.

The Last Child of Gallifrey settles on her mother’s grave, and gleams, to the ages, her beauty.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [They Who Walk in Shadows](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12118476) by [President Romana (asoldandtrueasthesky)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asoldandtrueasthesky/pseuds/President%20Romana)




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